Optimizing User Quality of Experience (QoE)

Applications can be complex, feature-rich, demanding, and written with performance often relegated as an afterthought or left to IT. Unfortunately, poorly written applications increase server TCP connections, increase user response times, and reduce application usage-which can severely impact productivity and revenue.

To address this challenge, offloading CPU-intensive TCP connections and multiplexing client HTTP transactions dramatically improve server performance. ADCs take I/O off of servers and let servers do what they do best: serve valuable content. This reduces the amount of physical servers and associated application software licensing costs, while improving user response times by an order of magnitude.

Another performance challenge is that servers repeatedly serve over 60 percent of Website content, reducing server utilization and increasing response times for users who request unique content. A simple solution is to offload static content to a front-end cache that acts as a proxy for application servers. This reduces server connections, increases server utilization and improves HTTP response times.

Sunil Cherian is Vice President of Product Marketing at Array Networks. A member of the founding team at Array, Sunil has also served as vice president of product management and director of engineering at Array. Previously, Sunil served as senior architect for Alteon WebSystems Inc., where he was responsible for several Layer 4-7 technologies. Before that, Sunil worked with Lucent, Octel and VMX. Cherian holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, India, and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Albany. He can be reached at sunil@arraynetworks.net.